"A list came around on my desk of a new group that
was being organized to do research in the solid state. The heads of this
group were to be joint: S.O. Morgan and William Shockley. I read through
this list and thought about it a minute and read through it quickly again,
and I said, 'By golly! There isn't an s.o.b. in the group. This is some
group.' Then after a minute I had a second thought that maybe I was the
s.o.b. in the group."

Walter Brattain

After
World War II

Brattain spent the war years working on
ways to detect submarines, and then returned to Bell Labs to find Kelly
was reorganizing the researchers. Brattain was assigned to a new solid
state group with Stanley Morgan and Bill Shockley at the head. John
Bardeen, a friend of Brattain's brother Robert, joined the group as
well. Bardeen's skill was in theory, while Brattain's was in experimenting.
The two men soon learned to work together beautifully — Bardeen would
watch Brattain conduct an experiment, and then offer hypotheses about
the results.

The
First Transistor

The close relationship between Brattain and Bardeen paid
off in what has become known as the "Miracle Month." For four weeks
the two men came up with one great idea after another. Over the month
they built several devices — each one a little better than the last
— and it all came together on Tuesday, December 16. Brattain sat down
at their latest attempt to build an amplifier. He turned on the voltage
and for once everything seemed to work just right. "This thing's got
gain!" Brattain said to no one in particular. That meant amplification.

Rifts
in the Lab

"Later in life, Brattain would
always say to people who really knew him well, that he really hated
that photo."  Michael Riordan,
author Crystal Fire

After the point-contact transistor was built, a clash
of personalities got the better of what had been a well-tuned research
group. The fight was over just how much credit Shockley
would receive. He was the team leader, but he worked on his own research
at home and left Bardeen and Brattain alone. A famous company publicity
photo of the three men shows how skewed the relationships were: Shockley
sat at center stage in front of the microscope as if he had done the
critical experiments. It was Brattain's laboratory bench and Brattain's
equipment, but Brattain stood behind his boss, as if Shockley had really
done the work. In fact, management at Bell Labs insisted that Shockley
appear in every publicity picture. He was the head of the group and
deserved to be there, the lab management felt. But they kept his name
off the patent. That did not make Brattain or Bardeen feel any better
about Shockley.

Over the next few years, Brattain continued to work in
Shockley's transistor group, but usually wasn't invited to work on the
most exciting research. He soon stopped reporting to Shockley of his
own accord, and eventually demanded that he be transferred to another
group altogether. Much happier away from Shockley, Brattain remained
at Bell until he retired in 1967.

Walter Brattain shows his parents
around the lab after the invention of the transistor was announced

The
Nobel Prize

At 7 AM, Thursday, November 1, 1956, Brattain was at home
when he got a phone call from a reporter. He had been awarded the Nobel
Prize for the invention of the transistor. He was soon swamped by
the media.
Later that morning he attended a meeting in the labs'
Murray Hill auditorium. As he walked into the room, everyone spontaneously
stood up and began to clap. It brought tears to his eyes. Later he wrote:
"What happened there is a matter of record, except possibly the extreme
emotion that one feels on receiving the acclamation of one's colleagues
and friends of years, knowing full well that one could not have accomplished
the work he had done without them, and that it was really only a stroke
of luck that it was he and not one of them."

Walter Brattain in 1964 on how important he realized
their discovery was:
"It is of interest to those that ask whether we
knew how important this was, that the evening of the first day, when
John had come in and suggested the geometry, I told my riding group
that night, going home, that I felt that I had that day taken part in
the most important experiment I had ever taken part in in my life. And
the next evening going home with them I had to swear them to secrecy."